neff@hpvcla.HP.COM (Dave Neff) (12/22/86)
I bought a Breakthru board last September. I too have been pleased with it. I also had some hard disk problems with the first board, a minor problem with a second board, but the third board is working fine. I think the product was released a bit prematurely, but PCSG has been a pleasure to work with. They were helpful, never hassled me about returning boards, and their engineers followed up on a couple problems I found with early boards. Their "Lightning" disk caching program is very useful if you have an EMS board, and it automatically "slows down" (technically it disables caching) when accessing the floppy disk, eliminating most of the timing loop in ROM hassles. The product they are now shipping seems quite solid. At $395 its one of the better buys. Of course if you use a math coprocessor you have to buy an 80287 (5 or 8 MHZ) which will effectively add a couple hundred to the price. I have read, however, that the "FAST 88" product is perhaps the best bang for your buck (it ups the motherboard clock speed but keeps the IO clock speed the same) and gives near AT performance, but I didn't go that route. The Breakthrough board runs at 8MHZ, has 16K of cache (most other boards have only 8K), and several other good performance oriented features for byte addressing and writing data to RAM. It comes with a 60 day money back guarantee and a 1 year warantee. Normal disclaimers .... Dave Neff hpfcla!hpvcla!neff